th picturesque crags and pine-crested heights, under a
cloudless September sun whose warmth is tempered by the
mountain-breeze, a thousand rough-looking, bronzed and bearded and
powder-blackened men are resting after battle.

Here and there on distant ridge and point the cavalry vedettes keep
vigilant watch, against surprise or renewed attack. Down along the banks
of a clear, purling stream a sentry paces slowly by the brown line of
rifles, swivel-stacked in the sunshine. Men by the dozen are washing
their blistered feet and grimy hands and faces in the cool, refreshing
water; men by the dozen lie soundly sleeping, some in the broad glare,
some in the shade of the little clump of willows, all heedless of the
pestering swarms of flies. Out on the broad, grassy slopes, side-lined
and watched by keen-eyed guards, the herds of cavalry horses are quietly
grazing, forgetful of the wild excitement of yester-even. Every now and
then some one of them lifts his head, pricks up his ears, and snorts and
stamps suspiciously as he sniffs at the puffs of smoke that come
drifting up the valley from the fires a mile away. The waking men, too,
bestow an occasional comment on the odor which greets their nostrils.
Down-stream where the fires are burning are the blackened remnants of a
wagon-train: tires, bolts, and axles are lying about, but all wood-work
is in smouldering ashes; so, too, is all that remains of several
hundred-weight of stores and supplies destined originally to nourish the
Indians, but, by them, diverted to feed the fire.

There is a big circle of seething flame and rolling smoke here, too,--a
malodorous neighborhood, around which fatigue-parties are working with
averted heads; and among them some surly and unwilling Indians, driven
to labor at the muzzle of threatening revolver or carbine, aid in
dragging to the flames carcass after carcass of horse and mule, and in
gathering together and throwing on the pyre an array of miscellaneous
soldier garments, blouses, shirts, and trousers, all more or less hacked
and blood-stained,--all of no more use to mortal wearer.

Out on the southern slopes, just where a ravine crowded with wild-rose
bushes opens into the valley, more than half the command is gathered,
formed in rectangular lines about a number of shallow, elongated pits,
in each of which there lies the stiffening form of a comrade who but
yesterday joined in the battle-cheer that burst upon the valley with the
setting